


Gifts of Love

by imaginary_golux



Series: The Emperor and His Consort [2]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blacksmith!Rey, Canon-Typical Violence, Emperor!Poe, Flirting, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining, ex-soldier!Finn, kid!BB-8
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 05:40:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8433868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imaginary_golux/pseuds/imaginary_golux
Summary: Emperor Poe is out roaming his city incognito when a handsome ex-soldier saves him from being mugged. Poe wants nothing more than to make his savior his consort, but the path of true love never did run smooth...Or, Poe's point of view on the whole matter.Beta by my Best Beloved, Turn_of_the_Sonic_Screw.





	

Being mugged in a dark alleyway of his own capital city is a truly _undignified_ way to die, Poe thinks muzzily. He’s not even carrying that much money, and he was so sure his clothing was nondescript enough to signal that he wasn’t worth robbing - but apparently he was wrong, and now that error is going to kill him, and leave poor Beebee fatherless as well as motherless. Gods damn.

The shout from the entrance to the alley makes both Poe and his attackers look up. The newcomer is backlit by the rising sun, looking like an avenging angel or a knight in shining armor come galloping to the rescue - Poe cannot be held accountable for his thoughts right now, okay, he’s been bashed over the head - as he strides into the alley. He’s wearing a sword, Poe sees through the haze of blood stinging his eyes, but he doesn’t bother to use it, just takes the three thugs _apart_ with swift, graceful motions and fists that must be hard as granite. And then he kneels down beside Poe - Poe gets an impression of dark, kind eyes, gentle fingers in his hair - and murmurs something soothing as he looks over Poe’s injury.

Then he produces a bandage - who carries _bandages_ around? - and hauls Poe to his feet by main force, which Poe shouldn’t find as appealing as he does, and helps him out of the dingy alleyway and down the street. Poe can’t help chuckling a little at the steady chant of “Left, right, left,” from his rescuer’s mouth. If the easy way the other man dispatched the thugs wasn’t enough to convince Poe his rescuer is an ex-soldier, the chant would do it.

“Soldier?” Poe asks, just to confirm, and his rescuer nods, and smiles, and natters cheerfully about his life while they cover the rest of the distance to the local Watch House. Poe wishes he could pay attention better, but the still-bleeding head wound is a little distracting. His rescuer _does_ have a lovely voice.

The medic in the Watch House doesn’t recognize Poe, though he _does_ do a very nice job of stitching up his head wound - Poe yearns a little after his rescuer as the beautiful man walks away, but only a little, since the medic is doing something with an astringent-smelling liquid that smells _horrid_ and stings terribly - but the commander of the local Watch _does_. The man throws a very small conniption, in fact, when he realizes that the _Emperor_ is sitting on a bed in the tiny infirmary, bandaged up and looking dazed. Poe lost his floppy hat in the mugging - he’s honestly surprised that no one else has recognized him. His profile _is_ on all the coins, after all.

On the other hand, he was bleeding like a stuck pig, so that might have been a little distracting.

The Watch commander sends for some of Poe’s guards, and Poe is shepherded back to the palace between Snap and Jess, who fuss over him so devotedly that Poe is almost ready to scream by the time they reach his rooms, and then he has to reassure Beebee, who has never seen her Papa in such a condition, that it’s just a flesh wound and he’ll be _fine_.

And then, of course, once Beebee is reassured and sent off to her tutors for the day, he has to tell Jess and Snap everything. They listen closely to his story, and then they look at each other, and Jess says, “So. This handsome rescuer of yours. Should we go check him out, make sure he’s good enough for our favorite Emperor?”

“I’m your _only_ Emperor,” Poe points out dryly. “But. Yes. You should probably - make sure he’s what he seems.”

Jess and Snap come back from their exploratory expedition, a few days later, with a beautiful dagger for Poe and the news that according to the Watch commander and pretty much everyone who’s ever met young Finn Smith, the man is just as much of a paragon as Poe hoped.

So Poe finds a day when he can slip away for a few hours, and dons his new floppy hat and clothing nice enough to - hopefully - make him look like a prosperous merchant or minor noble of some sort, and goes down into his city to see if Finn Smith would like to make his acquaintance in less bloody circumstances.

Poe is honestly assuming that Finn Smith is not going to be as stunningly gorgeous as Poe remembers him being, because the man coming out of the sunrise to rescue you from certain death is _always_ going to look like the most gorgeous thing on the face of the earth. But as he pushes open the door to the little shop, Poe loses all his breath in an astonished gasp. Finn Smith really _is_ that beautiful, with dark, kind eyes and a stunningly handsome face and a smile, Poe sees as Finn looks up to greet him, that could rival the sunrise.

Welp, Poe is well and truly fucked.

Finn is as charming as he is gorgeous, so obviously proud of the work of his oathsister’s hands that Poe would have bought something even if it was rubbish - but Finn’s oathsister makes some of the most astonishing, beautiful ironwork Poe has ever seen. The tiny dragon in Finn’s dextrous hands is a masterwork, delicate and intricate and glorious, and Poe commissions himself a falcon without a second thought. If it comes out as well as he thinks it will, he’ll get something for Beebee, too - maybe a little toy cat that stretches, or a dog that wags its tail. The blacksmith who could make this dragon could do either of those easily.

 _And_ Poe manages to get a date with Finn Smith, who saved his life. Getting mugged in an alleyway may just have been the best bad thing ever to happen to Poe.

*

Finn is alarmingly delightful company. He’s an artist in his own right - Poe can’t help admiring the beautiful pendant Finn wears, the work of Finn’s lovely hands - and he’s clever and funny and sweet, and says what he thinks without trying to hide the true meaning under fifteen layers of obfuscation in case Poe doesn’t like it and he needs plausible deniability, the way half of Poe’s courtiers do. And he seems to like _Poe_ , just for himself, not ‘His Imperial Majesty Apollonius Dameron the Third.’ By the end of their first date, Poe knows he’s irrevocably, helplessly smitten with Finn Smith.

Thankfully, Finn seems just as interested in Poe. He comes up with half a dozen delightful dates, he asks about Beebee every time he and Poe meet, he leans against Poe’s shoulder as they sit on the riverbank and smiles like sunrise and laughs at all of Poe’s terrible jokes and is so clearly as _wonderfully_ happy just to be in Poe’s company as Poe is to be in his.

Poe is thinking, quite seriously, about proposing to Finn - Poe has an heir, after all, there’s no need for him to take a wife; he’s even told Beebee about ‘Mister Finn’ and how nice he is - when it all goes _spectacularly_ to pot.

*

In retrospect, Poe thinks, it’s honestly rather surprising that no one has recognized him yet. It’s not as though the floppy hat is magical, or anything - it’s just floppy and absurdly comfortable and sort of ridiculous. But so far no one but the Watch commander has ever recognized Poe while he’s out and about in his capital city incognito - except Finn’s sister, the distressingly sharp-eyed Rey.

Sharp- _tongued_ , too. She tears verbal strips off of Poe for breaking her brother’s heart, warns him never to return to her smithy on pain of broken kneecaps, and kicks him out of the shop. Poe has never actually been kicked out of anywhere before - it doesn’t tend to happen to emperors, after all - and stands there in the street staring at the closed door for rather longer than he probably should, until the clatter of hammer on metal tells him that Rey has returned to her work. He looks down at the falcon in his hand - she’d shoved it at him as she backed him out the door - and sighs. It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. It’s worth every gold piece he paid for it.

It is not, and never could be, worth losing Finn.

His guards are livid when he gets back to the palace and tells them that it’s over, that Finn wants nothing to do with the Emperor, but Poe talks them down. It’s - well, honestly, it’s probably the _smart_ choice for Finn. Poe really oughtn’t wish the nightmare of the court on someone he really loves. But he was planning to _shield_ Finn from that, to let Finn be himself, be Poe’s quiet place away from the intrigues of the court, and never make Finn deal with the idiotic councilors or the simpering courtiers.

Of course, he never _told_ Finn that.

Things would probably have gone better if he’d told Finn that.

*

Poe doesn’t miss his nightly time with Beebee for anything less than an actual war, and sometimes not even that, so that evening finds him in her rooms, obediently directing the ragdoll in his hands to drink tea out of a rather battered mug. (Beebee is hard on her toys, but she loves them, and Poe has orders in place that nothing of hers will be taken away and replaced unless she _asks_ , after the first time her favorite toy was replaced in the night and she threw a tantrum so spectacular it’s _still_ talked about in the servants’ halls.) But Beebee is a perceptive little thing.

“Why are you sad, Papa?” she asks.

Poe sighs. “Well, I was hoping Mister Finn would want to marry me,” he explains, as gently and dispassionately as he can. “And he decided he didn’t want to. So I’m going to be a little sad for a while.”

“Oh,” says Beebee, and thinks about this for a while, and then climbs gracelessly into Poe’s lap and wraps her little arms around him in a tight hug. Poe hugs back, endlessly grateful, as he always is, for the daughter that the gods have blessed him with.

After a few minutes she pulls out of the hug to plant a sloppy kiss on his cheek, and then nods, looking very satisfied with herself. “I kissed it all better,” she says firmly, and Poe honestly can’t help laughing. “Now we play horsie.”

“Yes, princess,” Poe says, still laughing, and obeys.

To be fair, it’s quite hard to maintain a proper level of just-been-rejected misery while trotting about on all fours with your tiny daughter thumping her heels against your ribs and pulling - gently, they’ve had this conversation before - on your hair to steer. Poe obediently tromples all of his daughter’s imagined enemies while she whoops with glee, and even manages, in the delight of making Beebee happy, to forget for a little while about Finn.

As soon as the door to his daughter’s rooms closes behind him, though, everything comes rushing inexorably back.

Finn doesn’t want him.

*

Poe sends Jess and Snap out, not to try to _convince_ Finn - that’s almost certainly a lost cause, as Poe knows Finn has a will of steel stronger than his oathsister’s blades - but to make sure he’s alright. Poe _thinks_ Finn was just as invested in their relationship as Poe was, and so presumably its abrupt and painful ending was just as unpleasant for Finn as it was for Poe.

Jess and Snap take it upon themselves, though, to ask Finn about his reasons, and come back with the welcome news that Finn looks like he is, at the very least, still eating and not pining away in misery - though he does look miserable - and the less welcome news that his list of reasons for not wanting to marry Poe is depressingly logical. Finn has - as Poe knows - no lineage or noble title, he cannot bear Poe children, and he would probably be eaten alive by the court.

It would be so much easier if Finn had just said he didn’t love Poe anymore, honestly. Because all of his objections are _sensible_ , they’re logical, they’re _true_ \- and for just a moment, one shining terrible moment, Poe thinks about giving up his throne for his beloved. What good do the trappings of royalty do, the pomp and circumstance of being Emperor of the Eastern Lands, if Poe cannot have the husband he desires?

But that would leave poor Beebee on the throne at the tender age of six, and Poe can’t do that to his daughter.

“You could make him a duke,” Jess suggests, grinning. “That’d make him noble.”

“I honestly don’t think he’d ever forgive me,” Poe sighs. But he does give Snap a message to bring back to Finn for him: that Beebee is Poe’s heir and he needs no other. It is the smallest and least important of Finn’s objections, but perhaps - perhaps it will be enough?

It’s not enough.

*

Poe knows he should leave Finn alone, and to be fair, _Poe_ doesn’t go down into the city to see his beloved. But Jess and Snap are better friends than Poe deserves, and they volunteer to check up on Finn every few days and make sure he’s getting on alright. Poe appreciates it more than he can say.

And when, on one morning’s stroll through the wool market, Poe happens to find a pair of truly gorgeous winter cloaks, he can’t really resist buying them for Finn and Finn’s oathsister, who is, after all, only trying to protect her brother. Jess brings the gifts down, and comes back with the news that Finn took them, but asked that Poe send no more. Poe winces.

He can’t _see_ Finn. He can’t send gifts. He has no idea if Finn even still loves him. Maybe - maybe it’s time to put this behind him. Poe will _always_ love Finn, always dream of having him at his side, but the work of ruling the Empire goes on. Poe needs to stop moping. It’s time.

*

Prince Kylo Ren of Alderaan is not the first foreign prince to come courting Poe, and Poe suspects he won’t be the last - because Poe has absolutely no intention of _marrying_ the prince. Oh, Kylo Ren is an attractive man, in a tall dark and brooding sort of way, and he’s clearly going out of his way to be courteous and attentive to Poe, but Poe does not have as short a memory as all that. Ten years ago, Prince Kylo Ren was the right hand of the traitorous Lord who tried to overthrow Poe and take the Empire’s throne, and while Snoke is quite thoroughly dead, Kylo Ren was sent back to his own country, since Poe didn’t want to risk a diplomatic incident of quite the scale that killing another country’s crown prince would create.

Kylo Ren, of course, is pretending that no such thing ever happened. But Poe remembers.

Still, Alderaan is an important country, with its seaports and its vast navy, and so it behooves Poe to be polite to the prince, even if he’d marry Kylo Ren roughly _never_. And of course Poe’s councilors, who know that Alderaan is a very important trading partner but do _not_ know, for the most part, that Kylo Ren was part of the Snoke Rebellion - it was hushed up by everyone involved, for various reasons, some of which Poe is now regretting - are all encouraging Poe to bind their countries together in holy matrimony. Poe _might_ have considered it, once, years ago, but not today. Poe might _never_ be able to stomach a political marriage, now that he’s tasted true love, but certainly if he does it won’t be with a man who tried to overthrow him once upon a time. For all Poe knows, Kylo Ren is just hoping to dispose of Poe quietly after the marriage - and Beebee, too, for that matter - and Poe is not inclined to let Kylo Ren have _any_ hope of taking the Empire’s throne.

But outright rejecting him won’t do either, so Poe is courteous to his unwanted suitor, and spends long hours explaining, over and over, to his councilors that he is not - not - repeat _not_ going to marry Kylo Ren.

*

The two parts of his day that Poe won’t give up for any reason short of war are his time with Beebee, which is sacrosanct, and his evening ride through the city. He knows it drives his guards batty, trying to keep him safe while he rides unarmored and vulnerable through the streets of his capital, but Poe is fairly sure that those dangerous evening rides are part of the reason he _is_ such a beloved Emperor: the people can see him, can speak to him, can bring him petitions that would normally not get past the footmen and chamberlains and all the other gatekeepers of the palace, and so they know him and love him as they could not know and love Poe’s grandfather, Apollonius the Second, who never left his palace. It was Poe’s father, Kestrel the Fourth, who instituted the practice of the Royal Procession, and Poe is proud to continue the tradition.

Though the best part of it recently has been that Poe has long established it as a _solitary_ tradition, and thus Kylo Ren and Poe’s councilors are not allowed to accompany him, and Poe has a precious hour when he doesn’t have to worry about being polite to a man who once tried to overthrow him, or coming up with courteous ways to put off the councilors who won’t understand why Poe isn’t interested in such a good match as the son of the Queen of Alderaan.

On this particular day, Poe’s councilors have been so obstreperous, and Kylo Ren so infuriatingly attentive, that Poe takes the opportunity given him by the cold weather which keeps most of the normal crowds indoors to sink into the quiet of his own mind, paying attention to nothing past the tips of Sable’s eagerly pointed ears. Which is why it is _Snap_ , not Poe, who first notices that the person waiting for them outside the city’s gates is Finn.

For a minute Poe actually suspects he might be hallucinating. What would _Finn_ be doing out here in the cold, waiting for Poe? But Sable is smarter than his rider, and goes pacing across the crisp grass to nudge Finn eagerly, wanting treats, while Poe sits staring in his saddle.

Poe finds his voice after a few more moments of gaping, but the only word that comes to mind is his beloved’s name. “Finn,” he says, the word a question and a desperate plea.

“Poe,” Finn says, and Poe basks in the sweet sound of his name on his beloved’s lips. “Poe, I love you.” Poe loses his breath again at that, can do nothing but stare helplessly while Finn says - impossibly, unbelievably - that he _will_ marry Poe, that he is Poe’s for the having if Poe still wants him - if Poe still _wants_ him? What sort of question is _that_?

Poe goes tumbling out of his saddle and throws himself into Finn’s arms, and clings to his beloved as tightly as he can. “If I don’t _want_ you anymore,” he gasps incredulously. “Not want you? That would be as simple as not wanting my next _breath_ , you beautiful idiot.” Finn looks faintly bemused, but he’s starting to smile, that sunrise smile that takes Poe’s breath away every time. “I will _never_ cease to want you,” Poe assures him.

And Finn - delightful Finn, wonderful Finn, Finn who Poe had almost stopped hoping for - pulls out a pendant so beautifully carved that it puts the master woodworkers of the court to shame, and offers it to Poe as though it’s not worth its weight in gold - as though what it symbolizes isn’t the one thing Poe’s nearly resigned himself to never having - and Poe puts it on and swears to himself that he will _never_ take it off.

“Marry me,” he says to Finn - nearly begs, if he’s being honest. “Be my consort. Stay with me. _Please_.”

“Yes,” says Finn, as though it has always been so simple, and Poe kisses the word from his lips, the taste of happiness bright and sweet in Finn’s mouth, and glories in the thought that finally - finally - _finally_ Finn will be his.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, I'm over on tumblr as imaginarygolux, and I would love to say hi!


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